A Study On Humanizing Xiehouyu In Perspective Of Embodied-Cognitive Blending Theory

Xiehouyu,as a unique language form with strong ethnic characteristics in Chinese,is concise and comprehensive with profound meanings,reflecting the cognitive way,values and cultural connotation of the Han Ethnic Group.Although scholars have attempted to explain the cognitive mechanism of Xiehouyu in different perspectives,they ignore the experiential basis of Xiehouyu and rarely explain it systematically in the perspective of embodied-cognitive linguistics.Besides,as one of the most common ones,the studies on humanizing Xiehouyu are insufficient.Taking the humanizing Xiehouyu as the research object,this study collects 1069pieces of humanizing Xiehouyu from the Dictionary of Xiehouyu(《中国歇后语大辞典》)edited by Wen(2015),and attempts to apply the Embodied-cognitive Blending Theory proposed by Professor Wang Yin in 2022 to conduct the embodied-cognitive research of humanizing Xiehouyu,aiming to answer the following two questions:1.What categories of humanizing Xiehouyu are there in the collected corpus?2.What is the generation mechanism of each category of humanizing Xiehouyu in the perspective of the ECBT?The findings are as follows: 1.The relationship between the first part and the second part of humanizing Xiehouyu can be one to one,one to many and many to one.Therefore,the sublimation of the humanizing Xiehouyu from “embodiment” to “cognition” is not only one-to-one correspondences,but also “one-to-many” or “many-to-one”.Different types of “embodiment” produce the same “cognition”,and the same “embodiment” can produce different types of “cognition”.According to the semantic features of the two parts of humanizing Xiehouyu,this study divides them into three types: one-embodiment and one-cognition type(539 pieces),one-embodiment and multi-cognition type(404 pieces),multi-embodiment and one-cognition type(126 pieces)of humanizing Xiehouyu.2.These three types of humanizing Xiehouyu differ in generation mechanism.Besides,the process of embodied-cognitive blending is a chain of multiple blending networks with sequential and hierarchical features,which is the result of people’s embodiment and cognition processing based on the real world.The formation process of different types of humanizing Xiehouyu strictly follows the kernel principle of embodied-cognitive linguistics,namely “reality-cognition-language”.People are adept at integrating lexical concepts purposefully on the basis of their own experience and knowledge reserve to form the expressions of humanizing Xiehouyu.This process emphasizes the subjective initiative of the cognitive subject and the pluralism of embodied cognition.This study applies the embodied-cognitive blending theory to explaining the generative mechanism of humanizing Xiehouyu and interprets the experiential basis of its formation,which not only enriches the research of cognitive linguistics and demonstrates the explanatory power of the revised cognitive integration theory,but also provides a strong support for the localization research of cognitive linguistics and a new idea for the future research of Xiehouyu.